The city has been the dominant form of human settlement since the early twentieth century and is now the habitat of more than half the world's population. It has also been the subject of one of the most consequential intellectual arguments of the past hundred years: whether cities should be planned from above by experts or grown from below by inhabitants; whether density is a problem or a resource; whether the automobile or the pedestrian should organize urban space; and who the city is for. The argument runs through architecture, planning, political economy, sociology, and philosophy, and its outcomes are visible in the built environment of every city on earth.
The central confrontation in the twentieth-century debate was between the modernist planning tradition — Le Corbusier's "Radiant City," Robert Moses's highways, the postwar public-housing towers — and its critics, above all Jane Jacobs, whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is the most influential book on cities ever written in English. But the argument did not begin or end there. Lewis Mumford had been writing about cities since the 1920s; Jane Addams had been living and working in them since the 1890s; David Harvey brought Marxist political economy to bear on urban questions from the 1970s; and Christopher Alexander tried to codify the principles of good urban form in a way that bypassed the planner-versus-inhabitant divide.
Annotated bibliography
The critique of modernist planning
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) — the book that changed everything. Jacobs argued that the modernist planners — Le Corbusier, Moses, the urban-renewal establishment — were destroying the conditions that made cities work: mixed uses, short blocks, old buildings, density, and the "sidewalk ballet" of street life. Written from observation of her own neighborhood (Greenwich Village) and grounded in what she called "the kind of problem a city is" — a problem of organized complexity, not of simplicity or disorganized complexity.
Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) — Jacobs's economic theory: cities, not nations, are the fundamental units of economic life, and their vitality depends on import-replacement and the generation of new work from old.
Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974) — the biography of Robert Moses as a history of what modernist planning did to New York: expressways through neighborhoods, public housing as vertical warehousing, parks for the car-owning middle class. The book that made Moses the villain of the planning narrative.
The modernist vision
Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (1923) and The City of To-morrow (1929) — Le Corbusier's vision of the city as a machine: towers in a park, separated functions, the automobile as the organizing technology. These books shaped twentieth-century planning more than any others, and the critique of them shaped the counter-tradition.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1961) — Mumford's magnum opus; a history of the city from Mesopotamia to the twentieth century. Mumford was critical of both modernist gigantism and suburban sprawl, and argued for what he called the "regional city" — decentralized, human-scaled, integrated with its hinterland.
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (1932) and When Democracy Builds (1945) — Wright's "Broadacre City" concept: the anti-urban vision, an acre of land per person, the automobile as liberator. The intellectual ancestor of American suburbia, for better and worse.
The social and political life of cities
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) — Addams's account of founding and running a settlement house on Chicago's West Side. Not a planning text, but an argument — made through practice — that the city's social life is its most important product and that the immigrant neighborhood has a logic and a value that the reformer must understand before intervening.
David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (1973) and Rebel Cities (2012) — Harvey brought Marxist analysis to urban geography: the city as a site of capital accumulation, gentrification as class warfare, the "right to the city" as a political demand. Rebel Cities extends the analysis to the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) — Los Angeles as the prototype of the privatized, surveilled, class-segregated city of the late twentieth century. Polemical and sometimes overdrawn, but prescient.
Pattern, form, and participation
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (1977) and The Timeless Way of Building (1979) — Alexander's attempt to identify the recurring patterns ("a room of one's own," "street cafe," "accessible green") that make built environments feel alive, and to put design decisions in the hands of inhabitants rather than professionals. Hugely influential in software design (via design patterns); less successful in architecture, where the profession resisted it.
Lina Bo Bardi — Bo Bardi's architecture (SESC Pompeia, MASP) embodies the argument that public space should be open, unprogrammed, and available for appropriation by its users. See Zeuler R.M. de A. Lima, Lina Bo Bardi (2013).
The contemporary debate
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) — the argument that cities thrive by attracting creative workers. Hugely influential on municipal policy; widely criticized for providing intellectual cover for gentrification and for conflating the interests of the "creative class" with the public interest.
Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (2011) — the economist's case for density: cities are greener, more productive, and more innovative than suburbs or rural areas. Useful data, thin on the distributional questions (whose city? who benefits from the density premium?).
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016) — ethnography of eviction in Milwaukee; makes visible the housing crisis as experienced by the urban poor. The contemporary successor to Jacobs's street-level observation, applied to a grimmer subject.